Yggdrasil: Materials

"Great news, all Warriors of Light! A new zone called Yggdrasil: Materials has been discovered  It appears that this zone speeds up your augmentation progress, as well as obtaining skillseed bonuses...?!"

- Announcement text

Yggdrasil: Materials is a new ability enhancement region introduced on December 17, 2018 as a place for newer players to easily upgrade Ability Cards in 3 ways:
 * Collect augmentation materials for Card Augmentation.
 * Unlock extra skills more swiftly than other regions.
 * Gather skillseeds more swiftly than other regions.

This region replaces the now removed exploration regions, notably Albion Plateau Redux, as the place to farm augment materials and skillseeds.

Region details

 * Select "Yggdrasil: Materials" from the world map -- branched off of the red "Specials" node.
 * You must complete Chapter 1: Blank Slate before this region becomes available.

There are 29 total areas, including 20 Augmentation Materials areas, 6 Extra Skills areas, 2 Cactuar areas, and the opening "Yggdrasil Materials Zone" area. There are no treasure chests. All areas can be teleported to, with the exception of the opening area.

In one corner of the screen you will find the Shortcuts button, which gives you a simple two-click transport to Pandemonium, Bahamut Lagoon, or the Ring of Braves.

Extra skill areas
In the center of the region is a set of six areas: one in each element. These areas have a high cost (60 stamina!) but they will net 20x the usual amount of skillseeds and have 6x the normal chance to unlock extra skills. These items stack with similar bonuses from cards, jobs and weapons with Skillseed Up and Improved Extra Skill Unlock auto-abilities, and Mobius Day, so you can easily take this up to 12x Extra Skill Unlock and 40x Skillseeds... or higher!

The enemies that appear here are very weak. In order to maximize skillseeds gained:
 * Equip the main deck with a Skillseed Up enabled job, weapon and cards;
 * Set the Battle Difficulty to Hard in the ETC &rarr; Config menu;
 * Aim for a battle score of 10 million points.

Cactuar areas
As of October 2019, two new areas show up. These have a LONG series of battles against cactuars guaranteed to be their selected element, with a slightly higher chance for Gold Gigantuars and Crystal Gigantuars to show up in each skirmish.

Not all enemies in here are Cactuars, but none of the fiends you meet will pose much challenge. Going into here with a character decked out in high Crystal Seeker boosts looks to be a great way to farm s.

Augmentation materials areas
This zone offers areas that drop specific Material Cards. These areas each feature 3 battles exclusively against the fiends that drop the specific selected material. (e.g. the Fiery Gems area only has Red Dragons as foes.) These fiends drop materials ONLY, so no ability cards, but they use their normal drop rates, so you'll gather 0-3 of that material per fight.

In addition, each area in the Materials Zone gives twice the normal skillseeds, and the rated difficulty stays as RED up through Card Lv. 250, so even Materials farming can be useful in building your skillseed stockpiles. The Wildblooms area in particular is one of the best areas in the game for farming skillseeds,, and s.

Enemies here are middling in difficulty -- they are Sub-bosses and Bosses, after all -- but a player who has completed the main storyline through Act 1 Chapter 3 should have little trouble plowing through them.